“White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday discussed the brutal slaying of five people in Texas,” the New York Post whines, “without noting the fugitive accused of the heinous crime is an illegal immigrant who had previously been deported four times.”

Francisco Oropesa, the subject of a continuing manhunt as I write this, allegedly murdered several of his neighbors after they complained about his noisy behavior (shooting in his back yard while intoxicated).

What does Oropesa’s immigration status have to do with anything? I’m tempted to say “nothing,” but on further thought this strikes me as a teachable moment.

The usual suspects, of course, want us to take this incident as confirmation that “illegal” immigration is an inherently terrible thing, and that the US government needs to dramatically increase its funding ($25 billion is the number in president Joe Biden’s 2023 budget request) and manpower (more than 40,000 government employees between the US Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement) dedicated to “immigration enforcement.”

The REAL lesson is that throwing tens of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of people at “immigration enforcement,” turning a 100-mile strip around the edges of the United States into a “constitution-free” zone where native and immigrants alike are subjected to warrantless searches and other predatory government behavior, and abducting and deporting people multiple times:

HAS. NOT. WORKED.

Nor is it about to suddenly, magically START working.

The borders of the United States have always been open (by constitutional mandate until the late 1800s, when the Supreme Court decided to start ignoring the Constitution and just let Congress do whatever it felt like).

The borders of the United States are open now. People who want to get in, get in. Some of them are abducted and deported. And those who still want to be here get BACK in.

The borders of the United States will always be open. With 95,500 miles of border and coastline, “securing the border” wouldn’t be an option even if the government put every member of the US armed forces, plus every state and local cop, on nothing but the business of “securing the border.”

Our choices are:

1. Open borders; or
2. Open borders AND a $25-billion, 40,000-guard, 100-mile-wide police state dedicated to the preposterous claim that we can have something other than open borders.

Pick one.

Either way,  Oropoesa’s victims remain exactly as dead as they would be if he was from Peoria.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“When it had a Democratic majority last year,” the New York Times reports, more than 200 years after the Boston Gazette decried Massachusetts state Senator Elbridge Gerry’s district as a sprawling, curving salamander-shaped monstrosity,  “the North Carolina Supreme Court voided the state’s legislative and congressional maps as illegal gerrymanders. Now the court has a Republican majority, and says the opposite.”

I’m shocked — SHOCKED! — to hear that a change of partisan composition on a court has resulted in partisan changes to the partisan content of that court’s rulings on partisan political matters.

The drawing of legislative districts across America is a never-ending partisan war. As the Forward Party’s platform points out, “over 80% of Congressional districts are considered  ‘safe’ seats — they are either clearly Republican or clearly Democratic, leading to a reelection rate over 90%.”

That’s not a side effect. It’s the intent. Legislative majorities draw districts to guarantee that they’ll REMAIN legislative majorities. Legislative minorities then go to court begging for rulings that give them majorities, or at least increase their minority numbers.

While those majorities and minorities often have demographic components — black vs. white, urban vs. rural, etc. — the components are generally subsumed into the simpler identifier of party affiliation.

The Forward Party’s proffered solutions are to “[i]mplement independent or non-partisan redistricting commissions” and pass federal legislation making it illegal to gerrymander by “packing” particular voter types into, or “cracking” them between, districts to benefit one party.

While I like the way the Forward Party thinks on the matter of gerrymandering, neither of those solutions will end gerrymandering, for two reasons.

One is that “independent” and “non-partisan” are meaningless terms. They just mean the party affiliations of the contemplated commissions’ members wouldn’t be publicly advertised, not that those affiliations wouldn’t exist. Anyone who lives in a town with “non-partisan” local elections knows what parties the mayor and council members belong to. Not mentioning a fact doesn’t change the fact.

Another is that the federal law in question would — like the North Carolina law mentioned above —  be interpreted by party-affiliated judges.

There are three ways to fix gerrymandering.

The simplest would be to do away with “districts” altogether and elect all political representatives “at large.” Every Floridian, for example, would get to vote to fill each seat in Florida’s legislature. That would entail its own problems, but it would move the complexities from the administrative end to the campaigns’ side of things.

The most obvious — and I’m far from the first to suggest it — is algorithmic districting: Have a computer draw districts of uniform population, taking no account whatsoever of any other factor (party affiliation, race, urban/rural, etc.). One person, one vote, no gaming of the system. Problem solved.

The third, and my preferred one, is to abandon political government, with its false claims of “representation,” altogether. I sense, however, that most Americans aren’t ready to go that far just yet.

Algorithmic districting is a distant second place solution, but it’s better than gerrymandering, even gerrymandering falsely advertised as “independent” or “non-partisan.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On April 25,  US president Joe Biden announced his intention to seek re-election in 2024.

“The question we’re facing,” Biden says in his announcement video, “is whether in the years ahead, we have more freedom or less freedom. More rights or fewer.”

“I know what I want the answer to be,” he continues, “and I think you do, too.”

Of course, it’s not about what anyone “wants” the answer to be. It’s about what the answer actually is.

The number of our rights doesn’t change, because we don’t get our rights from presidents, elections, or constitutions.

We get them from what the Declaration of Independence refers to as “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”

We have them because we’re human beings, not because Joe Biden, or anyone else, sits in the Oval Office.

The “freedoms” Biden refers to are entirely a question of whether or not he and his fellow politicians respect those rights.

More than 50 years in politics proves that no, Biden doesn’t respect them. His version of a “right” is the privilege of living as Joe Biden orders us to live.

And those orders can turn on a dime. Note, for example, the skid marks left on various campaigns trails by his sudden switches from “pro-life” to “pro-choice” (2019), from “pro-death-penalty” to “anti-death-penalty” (2019), from “marriage is between a man and a woman” to “marriage equality” (2012), and from “build the wall” to “build the wall but phrase it differently” (2013).

It’s almost as if he says whatever he thinks his base wants to hear, because he thinks that’s what his base wants to hear, so that he gets re-elected.

Just like his most probable general election opponent, Donald Trump.

Every four years, I hear from upstart, dark horse candidates that “we can do better.” But can we?

Political power lends itself well to holding onto political power. So much so that that seems to be its main use by those who grasp it even once.

Which explains why our two mostly likely future presidents are two age-befuddled geezers who plainly don’t live in the real world now, if ever they did, and why Capitol Hill is swarming with Senators who can’t find their car keys without pulling staffers off of “look for a good sale price on adult diapers” duty to help.

The only real term limit is death of old age. And America’s looking pretty long in the tooth itself.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY